A Cornell program designed to help academic administrators cope with the legal and social problems created by modern information technology will become a joint effort of the university and EDUCAUSE, a national nonprofit association whose mission is to advance higher education by promoting the intelligent use of information technology.
The new EDUCAUSE/Cornell Institute for Computer Policy and Law (ICPL) will continue to advise and assist information technology and legal professionals in academic institutions in the development of IT policies, primarily through an annual seminar, along with a new round of pre-conference seminars.
"Both Cornell and EDUCAUSE can accomplish more by working together than either of us could working alone," said Polley Ann McClure, Cornell's vice president for information technologies. "Cornell created the Computer Policy and Law program, and it has been recognized as an authoritative resource for information and perspective on issues of policy related to information technology.
"But CPL cannot expand beyond its current effectiveness if we keep it under Cornell's umbrella," said McClure. "EDUCAUSE can spotlight ICPL in association with national and regional conferences and its extensive web presence. With EDUCAUSE, we can broaden the scope of the program without additional cost to Cornell. I'd like to see ICPL on the agenda of more national conferences. I also hope to see a larger suite of institutions taking advantage of its programs."
The new institute will be governed by a steering committee that includes McClure, Brian Hawkins, president of EDUCAUSE, and other representatives from EDUCAUSE and Cornell, but everyday operations will still be handled by Tracy Mitrano, policy adviser to Cornell Information Technologies, and Steven L. Worona, director of Policy and Networking Programs at EDUCAUSE, who were co-directors of the original Cornell program. Worona, a veteran Cornellian, left his post as assistant to McClure last year to join EDUCAUSE.
Speaking for EDUCAUSE, Worona said, "By collaborating with Cornell on the institute, we advance our leadership mission by starting with a well-established program instead of having to invent something new."
In addition to the summer seminars, the institute will offer consulting and information resources, including a web site-policy database and mailing list. It draws on the expertise of chief information officers, policy advisers, information technology architects, security coordinators and incident response personnel, university attorneys and other information technology professionals to analyze contemporary developments in policy and law and assess their impact on information technology organizations, administration and operations.
"Policy and law are centrifugal forces for information technologies in higher education, and that force will only increase in coming years," Mitrano said. "The EDUCAUSE-Cornell collaboration aspires to provide premier services to IT professionals to learn about new developments in these areas, to consult with the personnel who work with them every day and to provide national forums for sharing and learning on these subjects."
Worona and Marjorie Hodges Shaw co-founded the original Cornell Computer Policy and Law initiative in 1996. "Our initial goal was to make Cornell the place to turn for guidance on issues related to information technology policies on college and university campuses. We wanted to share what we had learned by carefully thinking through these issues," said Shaw, director emeritus of the program.
"We offered the Cornell University Responsible Use of Electronic Communications Policy as a model to institutions and received much appreciation for that. We envisioned CPL as a way to bring together technologists, lawyers and administrators to work collaboratively on these issues. We also hoped to create a repository of computer policies so institutions would have a place to turn when beginning the policy creation process."
This year the ICPL will sponsor two preconference seminars at EDUCAUSE 2002, to be held at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta, Oct. 1-4. The topics are the analysis of the law and political policy of the USA-Patriot Act and its academic policy implications for information technologies at colleges and universities.
| Cornell Chronicle Front Page | | Table of Contents | | Cornell News Service Home Page |